I actually think this is not a bad outcome, allows fintech companies to focus more on long term value creation vs chasing endless growth (although of course they will still need to grow…)

8) Larger tech companies offering more “fintech” products

Everything is fintech if you look closely. I don’t expect large tech companies to be launching competing fintech products any time soon, but increasingly they are starting to offer more products that look like fintech.

Privacy topics from 2018 will prevent many of these companies from launching new finance products quickly - public fintech companies to watch IMO are Amazon, Square, PayPal, and FiServ.

9) M&A activity driven by banking core providers

Hot take - I think we’ll see FiServ ($29B market cap) acquire a “newer-age” banking core provider like a Q2 holdings ($2B market cap), or a large bank acquiring a smaller core banking provider to jumpstart a new application

10) All of the large fintech unicorns stay private

Pretty self explanatory - it seems as though most unicorn fintech companies still have a healthy amount of funding (at least off the number of ads that I see still…), so no need to IPO for 2019

Unicorn companies will find other ways to provide liquidity to employees while still staying private ala Uber’s secondary offerings, etc.

Matt Harris, managing director at Bain Capital Ventures: “In terms of 2019 IPOs, it will be interesting to see if Credit Karma decides to go public. They certainly have the scale and profitability.”

Matt Harris: “I’m skeptical that big tech will be more aggressive in fintech in 2019 … privacy concerns will make that hard for many of them. Amazon is the notable exception. Never bet against them!”

Vanessa Colella, head of Citi Ventures at Citigroup Inc.: “I do not think we’ll see any major mergers, acquisitions or IPOs in fintech specifically. Stripe has done some incredible work and has the potential to be one to watch for the IPO track, but ultimately we expect to see continued growth in the private market.”

“I think we’re likely to have a war for deposits with too many different types of firms competing for deposits. Just look at the United States last year. All of the deposit growth we saw was explained by Bank of America, Wells Fargo and JP Morgan Chase. Everyone else shrank. But if you have Monzo and Revolut come to the U.S. and you look at Acorns, MoneyLion, Chime and 15 other prepaid models or fully chartered bank models, they’re all going to have a pretty slick interface, and they’re all going to be out there competing for deposits.”